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Full-Text Psychology Journal Articles

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Emily is a board-certified science editor who has worked with top digital publishing brands like Voices for Biodiversity, Study.com, GoodTherapy, Vox, and Verywell.

Wilfred Y Wong / Getty Images

If you are a psychology student or taking any sort of social science class, then you will need to be able to read and understand the articles found in scientific research journals. Such articles describe different psychology studies on a wide range of subjects. As you are writing papers or conducting your own research, these journals can provide helpful background information and other sources to investigate.

Finding full-text psychology journals online can be challenging. Imagine you think you have found the perfect journal article by its fitting title. You click on it and read the abstract, and now you are certain that you must have this article in your collection of sources, only to find out the full text is hidden behind a paywall. You are shocked to find out you have to pay $29.95 to access the article!

Fortunately, there are a number of psychology, social science, and medical journals that offer  free full-text articles, often labeled "open-access" journals. Full-text journals may be especially useful for people with limited access to academic libraries or online databases and for students living in rural areas or studying via distance education.

This article will review a selection of journals, databases, archives, and search engines that offer access to full-text articles, each with its own benefits and limitations.

Full-Text Psychology Journals

You might consider starting your search with journals that offer full-text, electronic versions of their content. Whether these journals offer the material you need for your research depends on the topic you are researching and the specific guidelines of your assignment.

Recently published articles may not be immediately available. Many journals that offer full-text versions of their content do so after a waiting period that may last anywhere from one month to one year after publication.

• Addictive Behaviors : An open-source platform that offers peer-reviewed journal articles on addictive behaviors. Full-text articles are in both HTML and PDF format.
• American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse : Focuses on a wide range of topics related to alcohol, substance abuse, and behavioral addictions, and includes topics related to public policy, epidemiology, neurobiology, and treatment aspects of substance abuse.
• Archives of Internal Medicine : Offers online full-text articles to registered users (registration is free), but you have to wait 12 months after publication to view articles for free. This journal is published by the American Medical Association (JAMA) and covers clinically relevant research on diverse medical topics.
• Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science (formerly called Journal of Abnormal Psychology ): Dating back to 1906, this journal has articles on a variety of topics related to  abnormal psychology ; and is published by the  American Psychological Association . Some of the articles are open-access, free-to-read, or provide a manuscript to view. Others require a subscription or you can pay a fee for individual articles.
• Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis : Hosted by Wiley Online Library, some articles require payment or a subscription to view current research and discussions on applied behavior analysis. However, some articles are marked as open-access or free-to-read.
• Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied : Offers a selection of full-text journal articles on topics in experimental psychology. Some of the articles are open-access, free-to-read, or provide a manuscript to view. Others require a subscription or you can pay a fee for individual articles.
• Journal of General Psychology : Hosted by Taylor & Francis Online, this journal offers full-text articles on a variety of topics in psychology. Some articles are open-access and can be a great reference for psychology students.
• Learning and Memory : Focuses on the neurobiology of learning and memory and offers free access to full-text articles one year after publication . Some articles are available immediately if the author of the article pays a surcharge, known as "gold" open-access.
• Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology (formerly called Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology ): Hosted on the SpringerLink platform, this journal features full-text articles focused on psychotherapy , prevention, assessment, and treatment of childhood conditions such as developmental disorders, depression, and anxiety. There is a subset of open-access articles in this journal that can be viewed for free.
• The British Journal of Psychiatry : Focuses on clinical aspects of mental health . Full-text articles are available from January 2000 to the present, and all articles are available free of charge one year after publication . Under the search bar, there is a box to check "search within full-text."
• The Journal of Neuroscience : Offers free full-text journal articles in their archive starting in 1981 up to the present, and are made available six months after publication.

These journals represent just some of the resources that are available online. If you are still looking for additional research, pay a visit to your university library. In many cases, your school's library may have access to a number of different research databases where you can find free full-text journal articles for your research.

Finding Free Full-Text Articles

In addition to looking at specific journals that provide access to full-text articles free of charge, it can be helpful to know how to find them in a more general sense. You can do a broader search for articles using the following archives, databases, and search engines:

CogPrints is a repository that holds self-archived articles for greater public access. Articles are categorized by topic, including many in psychology. Find articles on behavioral analysis , clinical psychology , psychobiology, social psychology , and more.

Taylor & Francis Online

Taylor & Francis provides hundreds of open-access journals to search, with full-text articles, including Health Psychology & Behavioral Medicine, Psychology Research and Behavior Management, and Nature and Science of Sleep.

Google Scholar

You can search for any topic using Google Scholar , and it will pull a list of journal articles, books, and other sources for you to consider. The more specific your search terms, the better. If you come across articles that only have abstracts or the first page, don't give up. Some authors may post the full content on their personal websites as HTML links or downloadable PDFs, or you may find the article available in other formats on other academic sites or journal databases. Do a little more digging (or googling).

JAMA Open Network

The JAMA network has 13 journals, of which two are fully open access ( JAMA Network Open and JAMA Health Forum ). However, JAMA allows authors from within any of the other specialty network journals to publish their articles in an open-access format giving the public immediate access to many of their current publications. Otherwise, there is a 6 to 12-month wait to view the full text which becomes available in PubMed Central.

Public Library of Science

PLOS One : The Public Library of Science provides open access to 12 journals that are peer-reviewed covering research in medicine and other scientific disciplines including psychology. PLOS Mental Health is a specific section covering mental health research.

PubMed Central

PubMed Central is a free digital archive of open-access, full-text scholarly articles published in biomedical and life science journals. This database is maintained by the United States National Library of Medicine. You can search for articles by topic, author, and journal-title. Be sure you don't confuse this with PubMed where you will only find abstracts.

Sage Journals

Sage Journals is a collection of open-access full-text journals categorized by topic, having 785 journals categorized as "social sciences and humanities." Registration is free. This includes a variety of journals like American Behavioral Scientist, Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry, Evolutionary Psychology, and Journal of Attention Disorders .

Springer Link

SpringerLink offers open access to journal articles and other resources. While not all of the content on the site is available in full-text, or free, many journals provide "gold" open access which allows immediate access to their published articles. To narrow down the search to full-text, open-access journals, you have to unselect the box that says "include preview-only content." You can find journals like Crime Science , Journal of Eating Disorders, and BioPsychoSocial Medicine .

The Cochrane Library

The Cochrane Library offers open-access, full-text versions of systematic reviews of existing research. You can browse by topic, look through special collections, or use the search tool to find articles relevant to your research.

In addition to finding sources in journals that publish full-print versions online, you can also look through databases and sites that may contain full-text psychology journal articles. If you find an abstract for an article that seems like it might be a good source, a simple online search can often turn up a full version of the article.

A Word From Verywell

Knowing where to locate journal articles can be helpful, but having the skills to search for them on your own can be invaluable. Each site is a little different and takes some getting used to. If you are still struggling to locate sources online, consider visiting your school's library for more information, tips, and resources. You might also consider signing up for workshops or courses offered by your school that help teach students how to search for academic resources.

JAMA Network. For authors .

Wiley Online Library. Issue information .

CSH Press. Open access option .

Cambridge Core. About The BJPsych .

Society for Neuroscience. Rights and permissions .

Singh A, Singh M, Singh AK, Singh D, Singh P, Sharma A. Free full text articles": Where to search for them?   Int J Trichology . 2011;3(2):75-79. doi:10.4103/0974-7753.90803

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

What this handout is about

This handout discusses some of the common writing assignments in psychology courses, and it presents strategies for completing them. The handout also provides general tips for writing psychology papers and for reducing bias in your writing.

What is psychology?

Psychology, one of the behavioral sciences, is the scientific study of observable behaviors, like sleeping, and abstract mental processes, such as dreaming. Psychologists study, explain, and predict behaviors. Because of the complexity of human behaviors, researchers use a variety of methods and approaches.  They ask questions about behaviors and answer them using systematic methods. For example, to understand why female students tend to perform better in school than their male classmates, psychologists have examined whether parents, teachers, schools, and society behave in ways that support the educational outcomes of female students to a greater extent than those of males.

Writing in psychology

Writing in psychology is similar to other forms of scientific writing in that organization, clarity, and concision are important.  The Psychology Department at UNC has a strong research emphasis, so many of your assignments will focus on synthesizing and critically evaluating research, connecting your course material with current research literature, and designing and carrying out your own studies.

Common assignments

Reaction papers.

These assignments ask you to react to a scholarly journal article.  Instructors use reaction papers to teach students to critically evaluate research and to synthesize current research with course material.  Reaction papers typically include a brief summary of the article, including prior research, hypotheses, research method, main results, and conclusions. The next step is your critical reaction. You might critique the study, identify unresolved issues, suggest future research, or reflect on the study’s implications.  Some instructors may want you to connect the material you are learning in class with the article’s theories, methodology, and findings. Remember, reaction papers require more than a simple summary of what you have read.

To successfully complete this assignment, you should carefully read the article. Go beyond highlighting important facts and interesting findings. Ask yourself questions as you read: What are the researchers’ assumptions? How does the article contribute to the field? Are the findings generalizable, and to whom?  Are the conclusions valid and based on the results?  It is important to pay attention to the graphs and tables because they can help you better assess the researchers’ claims.

Your instructor may give you a list of articles to choose from, or you may need to find your own.  The American Psychological Association (APA) PsycINFO database is the most comprehensive collection of psychology research; it is an excellent resource for finding journal articles.  You can access PsycINFO from the E-research tab on the Library’s webpage.   Here are the most common types of articles you will find:

• Empirical studies test hypotheses by gathering and analyzing data. Empirical articles are organized into distinct sections based on stages in the research process: introduction, method, results, and discussion.
• Literature reviews synthesize previously published material on a topic.  The authors define or clarify the problem, summarize research findings, identify gaps/inconsistencies in the research, and make suggestions for future work. Meta-analyses, in which the authors use quantitative procedures to combine the results of multiple studies, fall into this category.
• Theoretical articles trace the development of a specific theory to expand or refine it, or they present a new theory.  Theoretical articles and literature reviews are organized similarly, but empirical information is included in theoretical articles only when it is used to support the theoretical issue.

You may also find methodological articles, case studies, brief reports, and commentary on previously published material. Check with your instructor to determine which articles are appropriate.

Research papers

This assignment involves using published research to provide an overview of and argument about a topic.  Simply summarizing the information you read is not enough. Instead, carefully synthesize the information to support your argument. Only discuss the parts of the studies that are relevant to your argument or topic.  Headings and subheadings can help guide readers through a long research paper. Our handout on literature reviews may help you organize your research literature.

Choose a topic that is appropriate to the length of the assignment and for which you can find adequate sources. For example, “self-esteem” might be too broad for a 10- page paper, but it may be difficult to find enough articles on “the effects of private school education on female African American children’s self-esteem.” A paper in which you focus on the more general topic of “the effects of school transitions on adolescents’ self-esteem,” however, might work well for the assignment.

Designing your own study/research proposal

You may have the opportunity to design and conduct your own research study or write about the design for one in the form of a research proposal. A good approach is to model your paper on articles you’ve read for class. Here is a general overview of the information that should be included in each section of a research study or proposal:

• Introduction: The introduction conveys a clear understanding of what will be done and why. Present the problem, address its significance, and describe your research strategy. Also discuss the theories that guide the research, previous research that has been conducted, and how your study builds on this literature. Set forth the hypotheses and objectives of the study.
• Methods:   This section describes the procedures used to answer your research questions and provides an overview of the analyses that you conducted. For a research proposal, address the procedures that will be used to collect and analyze your data. Do not use the passive voice in this section. For example, it is better to say, “We randomly assigned patients to a treatment group and monitored their progress,” instead of “Patients were randomly assigned to a treatment group and their progress was monitored.” It is acceptable to use “I” or “we,” instead of the third person, when describing your procedures. See the section on reducing bias in language for more tips on writing this section and for discussing the study’s participants.
• Results: This section presents the findings that answer your research questions. Include all data, even if they do not support your hypotheses.  If you are presenting statistical results, your instructor will probably expect you to follow the style recommendations of the American Psychological Association. You can also consult our handout on figures and charts . Note that research proposals will not include a results section, but your instructor might expect you to hypothesize about expected results.
• Discussion: Use this section to address the limitations of your study as well as the practical and/or theoretical implications of the results. You should contextualize and support your conclusions by noting how your results compare to the work of others. You can also discuss questions that emerged and call for future research. A research proposal will not include a discussion section.  But you can include a short section that addresses the proposed study’s contribution to the literature on the topic.

Other writing assignments

For some assignments, you may be asked to engage personally with the course material. For example, you might provide personal examples to evaluate a theory in a reflection paper.  It is appropriate to share personal experiences for this assignment, but be mindful of your audience and provide only relevant and appropriate details.

Writing tips for psychology papers

Psychology is a behavioral science, and writing in psychology is similar to writing in the hard sciences.  See our handout on writing in the sciences .  The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association provides an extensive discussion on how to write for the discipline.  The Manual also gives the rules for psychology’s citation style, called APA. The Library’s citation tutorial will also introduce you to the APA style.

Suggestions for achieving precision and clarity in your writing

• Jargon: Technical vocabulary that is not essential to understanding your ideas can confuse readers. Similarly, refrain from using euphemistic phrases instead of clearer terms.  Use “handicapped” instead of “handi-capable,” and “poverty” instead of “monetarily felt scarcity,” for example.
• Anthropomorphism: Anthropomorphism occurs when human characteristics are attributed to animals or inanimate entities.  Anthropomorphism can make your writing awkward.  Some examples include: “The experiment attempted to demonstrate…,” and “The tables compare…”  Reword such sentences so that a person performs the action: “The experimenter attempted to demonstrate…”  The verbs “show” or “indicate” can also be used: “The tables show…”
• Verb tenses: Select verb tenses carefully. Use the past tense when expressing actions or conditions that occurred at a specific time in the past, when discussing other people’s work, and when reporting results.  Use the present perfect tense to express past actions or conditions that did not occur at a specific time, or to describe an action beginning in the past and continuing in the present.
• Pronoun agreement: Be consistent within and across sentences with pronouns that refer to a noun introduced earlier (antecedent). A common error is a construction such as “Each child responded to questions about their favorite toys.” The sentence should have either a plural subject (children) or a singular pronoun (his or her). Vague pronouns, such as “this” or “that,” without a clear antecedent can confuse readers: “This shows that girls are more likely than boys …” could be rewritten as “These results show that girls are more likely than boys…”
• Avoid figurative language and superlatives: Scientific writing should be as concise and specific as possible.  Emotional language and superlatives, such as “very,” “highly,” “astonishingly,” “extremely,” “quite,” and even “exactly,” are imprecise or unnecessary. A line that is “exactly 100 centimeters” is, simply, 100 centimeters.
• Avoid colloquial expressions and informal language: Use “children” rather than “kids;” “many” rather than “a lot;” “acquire” rather than “get;” “prepare for” rather than “get ready;” etc.

Reducing bias in language

Your writing should show respect for research participants and readers, so it is important to choose language that is clear, accurate, and unbiased.  The APA sets forth guidelines for reducing bias in language: acknowledge participation, describe individuals at the appropriate level of specificity, and be sensitive to labels. Here are some specific examples of how to reduce bias in your language:

• Acknowledge participation: Use the active voice to acknowledge the subjects’ participation. It is preferable to say, “The students completed the surveys,” instead of “The experimenters administered surveys to the students.”  This is especially important when writing about participants in the methods section of a research study.
• Gender: It is inaccurate to use the term “men” when referring to groups composed of multiple genders. See our handout on gender-inclusive language for tips on writing appropriately about gender.
• Race/ethnicity: Be specific, consistent, and sensitive with terms for racial and ethnic groups. If the study participants are Chinese Americans, for instance, don’t refer to them as Asian Americans. Some ethnic designations are outdated or have negative connotations. Use terms that the individuals or groups prefer.
• Clinical terms: Broad clinical terms can be unclear. For example, if you mention “at risk” in your paper, be sure to specify the risk—“at risk for school failure.”  The same principle applies to psychological disorders. For instance, “borderline personality disorder” is more precise than “borderline.”
• Labels: Do not equate people with their physical or mental conditions or categorize people broadly as objects. For example, adjectival forms like “older adults” are preferable to labels such as “the elderly” or “the schizophrenics.” Another option is to mention the person first, followed by a descriptive phrase— “people diagnosed with schizophrenia.”  Be careful using the label “normal,” as it may imply that others are abnormal.
• Other ways to reduce bias: Consistently presenting information about the socially dominant group first can promote bias. Make sure that you don’t always begin with men followed by other genders when writing about gender, or whites followed by minorities when discussing race and ethnicity. Mention differences only when they are relevant and necessary to understanding the study. For example, it may not be important to indicate the sexual orientation of participants in a study about a drug treatment program’s effectiveness. Sexual orientation may be important to mention, however, when studying bullying among high school students.

Works consulted

We consulted these works while writing this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find additional publications. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . We revise these tips periodically and welcome feedback.

American Psychological Association. n.d. “Frequently Asked Questions About APA Style®.” APA Style. Accessed June 24, 2019. https://apastyle.apa.org/learn/faqs/index .

American Psychological Association. 2010. Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association . 6th ed. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Landrum, Eric. 2008. Undergraduate Writing in Psychology: Learning to Tell the Scientific Story . Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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How to demonstrate critical evaluation in your psychology assignments

Thinking critically about psychology research

Critical thinking is often taught in undergraduate psychology degrees, and is a key marking criteria for higher marks in many assignments. But getting your head around how to write critically can sometimes be difficult. It can take practice. The aim of this short blog is to provide an introduction to critical evaluation, and how to start including evidence of critical evaluation in your psychology assignments.

So what does “critical evaluation” really mean?

Broadly speaking, critical evaluation is the process of thinking and writing critically about the quality of the sources of evidence used to support or refute an argument. By “ evidence “, I mean the literature you cite (e.g., a journal article or book chapter). By “ quality   of the evidence “, I mean thinking about whether this topic has been tested is in a robust way. If the quality of the sources is poor, then this could suggest poor support for your argument, and vice versa. Even if the quality is poor, this is important to discuss in your assignments as evidence of critical thinking in this way!

In the rest of this blog, I outline a few different ways you can start to implement critical thinking into your work and reading of psychology. I talk about the quality of the evidence, a few pointers for critiquing the methods, theoretical and practical critical evaluation too. This is not an exhaustive list, but hopefully it’ll help you to start getting those higher-level marks in psychology. I also include an example write-up at the end to illustrate how to write all of this up!

The quality of the evidence

There are different types of study designs in psychology research, but some are of higher quality than others. The higher the quality of the evidence, the stronger the support for your argument the research offers, because the idea has been tested more rigorously. The pyramid image below can really help to explain what we mean by “quality of evidence”, by showing different study designs in the order of their quality. 

Not every area of psychology is going to be full of high quality studies, and even the strongest sources of evidence (i.e., systematic reviews and/or meta-analyses) can have limitations! Because no study is perfect, it can be a good habit to tell the reader, in your report, (i) what the  design  of the study is that you’re citing, AND, (ii)  how  this affects your argument. Doing so would be evidence of critical thought. (See an example write-up below for implementing this, but do not copy and paste it!) 

But first, what do I mean by “design”? The design of the study refers to  how  the study was carried out. There are sometimes broad categories of design that you’ll have heard of, like a ‘survey design’, ‘a review paper’, or an ‘experimental design’. Within these categories, though, there can be more specific types of design (e.g. a  cross-sectional  survey design, or a  longitudinal  survey design; a  randomised controlled  experiment or a  simple pre-post  experiment). Knowing these specific types of design is a good place to start when thinking about how to critique the evidence when citing your sources, and the image below can help with that. 

Image source: https://thelogicofscience.com/2016/01/12/the-hierarchy-of-evidence-is-the-studys-design-robust/

In summary, there are various types of designs in psychology research. To name a few from the image above, we have: a meta-analysis or a systematic review (a review paper that summarises the research that explores the same research question); a cross-sectional survey study (a questionnaire that people complete once – these are really common in psychology!). If you’re not familiar with these, I would  highly suggest  doing a bit of reading around these methods and some of their general limitations – you can then use these limitation points in your assignments! To help with this, you could do a Google Scholar search for ‘limitations of a cross-sectional study’, or ‘why are randomised control trials gold standard?’. You can use any published papers as further support as a limitation.

Methodological critical evaluation

• Internal validity: Are the findings or the measures used in the study reliable (e.g., have they been replicated by another study, and is the reliability high)? 
• External validity: Are there any biases in the study that might affect generalisability(e.g., gender bias, where one gender may be overrepresented for the population in the sample recruited)?  Lack of generalisability is a common limitation that undergraduates tend to use by default as a limitation in their reports. It’s a perfectly valid limitation, but it can usually be made much more impactful by explaining exactly  how  it’s a problem for the topic of study. In some cases, this limitation may not be all that warranted; for example, a female bias may be expected in a sample of psychology students, because undergraduate courses tend to be filled mostly with females! 
• What is the design of the study, and how it a good or bad quality design (randomised control trial, cross-sectional study)? 

Theoretical critical evaluation

• Do the findings in the literature support the relevant psychological theories?
• Have the findings been replicated in another study? (If so, say so and add a reference!)

Practical critical evaluation

• In the real world, how easy would it be to implement these findings?
• Have these findings been implemented? (If so, you could find out if this has been done well!)

Summary points

In summary, there are various types of designs in psychology research. To name a few from the image above, we have: a meta-analysis or a systematic review (a review paper that summarises the research that explores the same research question); a cross-sectional survey study (a questionnaire that people complete once – these are really common in psychology!). If you’re not familiar with these, I would highly suggest doing a bit of reading around these methods and some of their general limitations – you can then use these limitation points in your assignments! To help with this, I would do a Google Scholar search for ‘limitations of a cross-sectional study’, or ‘why are randomised control trials gold standard?’. You can use these papers as further support as a limitation.

You don’t have to use all of these points in your writing, these are just examples of how you can demonstrate critical thinking in your work. Try to use at least a couple in any assignment. Here is an example of how to write these up:

An example write-up

“Depression and anxiety are generally associated with each other (see the meta-analysis by [reference here]). For example, one of these studies was a cross-sectional study [reference here] with 500 undergraduate psychology students. The researchers found that depression and anxiety (measured using the DASS-21 measure) were correlated at  r  = .76, indicating a strong effect. However, this one study is limited in that it used a cross-sectional design, which do not tell us whether depression causes anxiety or whether anxiety causes depression; it just tells us that they are correlated. It’s also limited in that the participants are not a clinical sample, which does not tell us about whether these are clinically co-morbid constructs. Finally, a strength of this study is that it used the DASS-21 which is generally found to be a reliable measure. Future studies would therefore benefit from using a longitudinal design to gain an idea as to how these variables are causally related to one another, and use more clinical samples to understand the implications for clinical practice. Overall, however, the research generally suggests that depression and anxiety are associated. That there is a meta-analysis on this topic [reference here], showing that there is lots of evidence, suggests that this finding is generally well-accepted.”

• Notice how I first found a review paper on the topic to broadly tell the reader how much evidence there is in the first place. I set the scene of the paragraph with the first sentence, and then the last sentence I brought it back, rounding the paragraph off. 
• Notice how I then described one study from this paper in more detail. Specifically, I mentioned the participants, the design of the study and the measure the researchers used to assess these variables. Critically, I then described  how  each of these pieces of the method are disadvantages/strengths of the study. Sometimes, it’s enough to just say “the study was limited in that it was a cross-sectional study”, but it can really show that you are thinking critically, if you also add “… because it does not tell us….”. 
• Notice how I added a statistic there to further illustrate my point (in this case, it was the correlation coefficient), showing that I didn’t just read the abstract of the paper. Doing this for the effect sizes in a study can also help demonstrate to a reader that you understand statistics (a higher-level marking criteria). 

Are these points you can include in your own work?

Thanks for reading,

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Browse Course Material

Course info.

• Prof. John D. E. Gabrieli

Departments

• Brain and Cognitive Sciences

As Taught In

• Cognitive Science

Learning Resource Types

Introduction to psychology, writing assignment 1.

Topic: Are studies of cognitive and emotional developments in adolescents useful for setting public policy guidelines?

To begin this assignment, you will read three sources (full citations and abstracts below):

• An analysis by Steinberg et al. of emotional and cognitive development in adolescents and how our understanding of these topics should be used in setting public policy, such as juvenile access to abortions or the death penalty;
• A criticism of this position by Fischer et al., who have a different perspective on how public policy should take into account emotional and cognitive development in juveniles; and,
• A rebuttal of the Fischer position by Steinberg et al.

Review the writing assignment guidelines given on the Syllabus . Your specific goal for Writing Assignment 1 is to analyze the arguments in the three papers, construct a coherent argument about the role of studies of cognitive and emotional development in setting public policy guidelines, and support this argument with specific evidence from the papers. A number of different approaches to this topic can satisfy the requirements of this writing assignment. For example, your thesis might address:

• In what circumstances can psychological research on cognitive and emotional development be used to set public policy?
• When, if ever, should public policy distinguish between cognitive and emotional development and why (or why not)?
• Whose view of psychological development – Steinberg or Fischer – is better for setting public policy and why?

There is no “correct” answer you are expected to discover. Instead, you should read the papers and develop your own conclusion about what role psychological research should play in setting public policy. Your thesis should clearly state your position, and you should use the rest of the paper to justify your conclusion with specific evidence from the background readings.

Abstracts are presented courtesy of the American Psychological Association.

Steinberg, L., et al. “ Are Adolescents Less Mature than Adults? Minors’ Access to Abortion, the Juvenile Death Penalty, and the Alleged APA ‘Flip-Flop’ .” American Psychologist 64, no. 7 (2009): 583–94.

Abstract : “The American Psychological Association’s (APA’s) stance on the psychological maturity of adolescents has been criticized as inconsistent. In its Supreme Court amicus brief in Roper v. Simmons (2005), which abolished the juvenile death penalty, APA described adolescents as developmentally immature. In its amicus brief in Hodgson v. Minnesota (1990), however, which upheld adolescents’ right to seek an abortion without parental involvement, APA argued that adolescents are as mature as adults. The authors present evidence that adolescents demonstrate adult levels of cognitive capability earlier than they evince emotional and social maturity. On the basis of this research, the authors argue that it is entirely reasonable to assert that adolescents possess the necessary skills to make an informed choice about terminating a pregnancy but are nevertheless less mature than adults in ways that mitigate criminal responsibility. The notion that a single line can be drawn between adolescence and adulthood for different purposes under the law is at odds with developmental science. Drawing age boundaries on the basis of developmental research cannot be done sensibly without a careful and nuanced consideration of the particular demands placed on the individual for “adult-like” maturity in different domains of functioning.”

Fischer, K. W., et al. “ Narrow Assessments Misrepresent Development and Misguide Policy .” American Psychologist 64, no. 7 (2009): 595–600.

Abstract : “Intellectual and psychosocial functioning develop along complex learning pathways. Steinberg, Cauffman, Woolard, Graham, and Banich (see record 2009-18110-001 ) measured these two classes of abilities with narrow, biased assessments that captured only a segment of each pathway and created misleading age patterns based on ceiling and floor effects. It is a simple matter to shift the assessments to produce the opposite pattern, with cognitive abilities appearing to develop well into adulthood and psychosocial abilities appearing to stop developing at age 16. Their measures also lacked a realistic connection to the lived behaviors of adolescents, abstracting too far from messy realities and thus lacking ecological validity and the nuanced portrait that the authors called for. A drastically different approach to assessing development is required that (a) includes the full age-related range of relevant abilities instead of a truncated set and (b) examines the variability and contextual dependence of abilities relevant to the topics of murder and abortion.”

Steinberg, L., et al. (2009b) “ Reconciling the Complexity of Human Development with the Reality of Legal Policy .” American Psychologist 64, no. 7 (2009): 601–4.

Abstract : “The authors respond to both the general and specific concerns raised in Fischer, Stein, and Heikkinen’s (see record 2009-18110-002 ) commentary on their article (Steinberg, Cauffman, Woolard, Graham, & Banich) (see record 2009-18110-001 ), in which they drew on studies of adolescent development to justify the American Psychological Association’s positions in two Supreme Court cases involving the construction of legal age boundaries. In response to Fischer et al.’s general concern that the construction of bright-line age boundaries is inconsistent with the fact that development is multifaceted, variable across individuals, and contextually conditioned, the authors argue that the only logical alternative suggested by that perspective is impractical and unhelpful in a legal context. In response to Fischer et al.’s specific concerns that their conclusion about the differential timetables of cognitive and psychosocial maturity is merely an artifact of the variables, measures, and methods they used, the authors argue that, unlike the alternatives suggested by Fischer et al., their choices are aligned with the specific capacities under consideration in the two cases. The authors reaffirm their position that there is considerable empirical evidence that adolescents demonstrate adult levels of cognitive capability several years before they evince adult levels of psychosocial maturity.”

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PSY 1010 - General Psychology: Assignment

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• Anatomy of Research Articles
• Evaluating Articles
• Managing Articles
• News vs. research articles
• Finding news articles and studies
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Psychology in My Life Writing Assignment

Purpose 

To measure students’ ability to:

• Explain major psychological concepts, theories, and perspectives.
• Read and describe research methods used in a peer-reviewed journal to explain behavior.
• Apply psychological concepts to personal, social, and organizational problems.
• Use information literacy skills to locate appropriate research and other relevant community resources and materials to create an informative essay.

Students will write an essay of 750-1000 words (not including title and reference pages) in which you analyze and synthesize psychological concepts apply them to your speculations concerning your career and your future life.  In the essay, you will need to clearly identify your career and why you have chosen it and then explain how what you have learned in psychology will enhance your career and life.   

This assignment is worth a possible 100 points.

The PSY 1010 essay will require you to use your critical thinking skills and your writing ability to address a question of primary importance:  How will you use psychology in your career and in your life?   In order to be able to successfully answer this question, you must be able to analyze and synthesize psychological concepts and be able to apply them to your speculations concerning your career and your future life.  In your essay, you will need to clearly identify your career and why you have chosen it and then explain how what you have learned in psychology will enhance your career and your life.   

Your paper will make use of two sources:

• The first source is your textbook itself. You will select FOUR PSYCHOLOGY concepts/topics from at least two different chapters to focus on in your paper.
• The second source is an article from a refereed (peer-reviewed) journal (preferably an American Psychological Association journal published within the last five years ) which addresses one of the psychological concepts or topics relevant to your intended career. You will want to find an article which is research (data-driven) based and which uses the experimental or correlational method .  The article must have the traditional sections associated with a research study (abstract, introduction (literature review), methods, results, discussion, references). That means no reviews of literature or other types of articles. If you are not sure, check with your instructor.

In discussing information from your text, you must reference the appropriate chapters, identify and define each relevant concept, and explain why the psychological concepts you focus on are or will be relevant to your career and your future life.  You will be expected to use specific examples of how the concepts will be relevant to your career. Merely saying a concept is important is not sufficient. You must be specific about how it will benefit you in your career.

For the journal article, you will be integrating the article and its content into your paper to highlight its significance to your chosen field of study rather than merely citing it.  You will be using the journal article to discuss its relationship to one of the concepts or topics you have selected as important to your career .  Note that you will be discussing the article and the implication of its findings for your career in some detail, not merely mentioning it in passing. 

Your paper must be done using APA formatting style which includes:

• A title page with the title in the middle of the page
• Page numbering in the upper right corner beginning with 1 on the title page
• In-text citations in APA format (that means the citation follows either the quote or the paraphrase of the information provided)
• A reference page at the end (called References) in APA format

Professional Journals

What is a professional journal?  

A professional journal is also known as a peer reviewed or scholarly journal. A professional journal publishes research articles by professionals in a particular field. Research articles are often lengthy and may contain tables and graphs. What  IS NOT  a professional journal?

A newspaper article, an entry in a dictionary or encyclopedia, an article from a magazine ( Time , Newsweek , Psychology Today , etc.) or an article you got from a website. (To access professional articles on websites, you usually have to have a subscription to the institution that publishes the journal. Some may be accessed for free, but usually it is the older back issues.) How do you find these professional journals in the library's databases?

See the section titled " Databases- Searching " in this research guide. It has an example on how to search for this type of article. 

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PSYC 2301 | Article Critique Assignment

• What is a Scholarly Article?
• Locating Scholarly Articles
• APA Citation

Write a 2-3 page college-level paper in APA format, in which you analyze one scientific, peer reviewed article in the discipline of psychology and discuss how the results of the study may benefit the surrounding community and/or society as a whole.

• Journal Article Critique Assignment
• Article topics must be selected from topics within the discipline of psychology.
• Anything from Chapters 1-15 of your textbook.

​U se the  Locating Scholarly Articles   tab on the left for help locating your scholarly article for this assignment.

The journal article...

• must be current (no earlier than January 2015 or as specified by professor )
• must come from professional, scientific journals. Click on the  What is a Scholarly Article?  tab to the left for a discussion of what makes an article scholarly.
• must be a research article (MUST HAVE SECTIONS LABELED " METHODS ", " RESULTS " & " DISCUSSION ")
• You must use APA format . Click the APA Citation tab on the left for help with APA format.
• APA format requirements include a cover page, reference page, in-text citations, etc. (*you do not need an abstract page for this paper.)
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Resources: Course Assignments

Assignment: Research in Psychology

Psychology in the news.

STEP 1 : Find a popular news article from within the past 10 years that reports on the results of a psychological study. This should not be a blog entry, but a published article from a news source such as  Time Magazine , The New York Times , Newsweek , NPR , CNN , Fox News , etc. A great place to look is the APA’s Psychology news portal:  http://www.apa.org/news/psycport/ . Read through the article and ensure that it is descriptive and sufficiently long enough in order to draw conclusions from the original research mentioned.

STEP 2 : Go find the psychological study or studies that are mentioned in the news report. Sometimes those are not freely available online, so you may have to track down the original study through your library’s website. You can find these articles within reputable journals, such as the  American Journal of Psychology ,  Cognitive Psychology ,  Emotion ,  Journal of Abnormal Psychology ,  Journal of Applied Psychology ,  Journal of Counseling Psychology ,  Journal of Educational Psychology ,  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , and  Memory . The study should have been performed within the past 10 years.

STEP 3 : Write a paper between 250-500 words that

• describes and summarizes both articles
• compares and contrasts the key points, style, and purpose of the news article with that of the research article
• examines if the news article accurately describes the research
• includes correct APA citations (both in-text and in a reference page) for both of the articles

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• Finding Articles Assignment. Provided by : Lumen Learning. License : CC BY: Attribution

General Psychology Copyright © by OpenStax and Lumen Learning is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Organizing Your Social Sciences Research Assignments

• Annotated Bibliography
• Analyzing a Scholarly Journal Article
• Group Presentations
• Dealing with Nervousness
• Using Visual Aids
• Grading Someone Else's Paper
• Types of Structured Group Activities
• Group Project Survival Skills
• Leading a Class Discussion
• Multiple Book Review Essay
• Reviewing Collected Works
• Writing a Case Analysis Paper
• Writing a Case Study
• About Informed Consent
• Writing Field Notes
• Writing a Policy Memo
• Writing a Reflective Paper
• Writing a Research Proposal
• Generative AI and Writing
• Acknowledgments

Definition and Introduction

Journal article analysis assignments require you to summarize and critically assess the quality of an empirical research study published in a scholarly [a.k.a., academic, peer-reviewed] journal. The article may be assigned by the professor, chosen from course readings listed in the syllabus, or you must locate an article on your own, usually with the requirement that you search using a reputable library database, such as, JSTOR or ProQuest . The article chosen is expected to relate to the overall discipline of the course, specific course content, or key concepts discussed in class. In some cases, the purpose of the assignment is to analyze an article that is part of the literature review for a future research project.

Analysis of an article can be assigned to students individually or as part of a small group project. The final product is usually in the form of a short paper [typically 1- 6 double-spaced pages] that addresses key questions the professor uses to guide your analysis or that assesses specific parts of a scholarly research study [e.g., the research problem, methodology, discussion, conclusions or findings]. The analysis paper may be shared on a digital course management platform and/or presented to the class for the purpose of promoting a wider discussion about the topic of the study. Although assigned in any level of undergraduate and graduate coursework in the social and behavioral sciences, professors frequently include this assignment in upper division courses to help students learn how to effectively identify, read, and analyze empirical research within their major.

Franco, Josue. “Introducing the Analysis of Journal Articles.” Prepared for presentation at the American Political Science Association’s 2020 Teaching and Learning Conference, February 7-9, 2020, Albuquerque, New Mexico; Sego, Sandra A. and Anne E. Stuart. "Learning to Read Empirical Articles in General Psychology." Teaching of Psychology 43 (2016): 38-42; Kershaw, Trina C., Jordan P. Lippman, and Jennifer Fugate. "Practice Makes Proficient: Teaching Undergraduate Students to Understand Published Research." Instructional Science 46 (2018): 921-946; Woodward-Kron, Robyn. "Critical Analysis and the Journal Article Review Assignment." Prospect 18 (August 2003): 20-36; MacMillan, Margy and Allison MacKenzie. "Strategies for Integrating Information Literacy and Academic Literacy: Helping Undergraduate Students make the most of Scholarly Articles." Library Management 33 (2012): 525-535.

Benefits of Journal Article Analysis Assignments

Analyzing and synthesizing a scholarly journal article is intended to help students obtain the reading and critical thinking skills needed to develop and write their own research papers. This assignment also supports workplace skills where you could be asked to summarize a report or other type of document and report it, for example, during a staff meeting or for a presentation.

There are two broadly defined ways that analyzing a scholarly journal article supports student learning:

Improve Reading Skills

Conducting research requires an ability to review, evaluate, and synthesize prior research studies. Reading prior research requires an understanding of the academic writing style , the type of epistemological beliefs or practices underpinning the research design, and the specific vocabulary and technical terminology [i.e., jargon] used within a discipline. Reading scholarly articles is important because academic writing is unfamiliar to most students; they have had limited exposure to using peer-reviewed journal articles prior to entering college or students have yet to gain exposure to the specific academic writing style of their disciplinary major. Learning how to read scholarly articles also requires careful and deliberate concentration on how authors use specific language and phrasing to convey their research, the problem it addresses, its relationship to prior research, its significance, its limitations, and how authors connect methods of data gathering to the results so as to develop recommended solutions derived from the overall research process.

Improve Comprehension Skills

In addition to knowing how to read scholarly journals articles, students must learn how to effectively interpret what the scholar(s) are trying to convey. Academic writing can be dense, multi-layered, and non-linear in how information is presented. In addition, scholarly articles contain footnotes or endnotes, references to sources, multiple appendices, and, in some cases, non-textual elements [e.g., graphs, charts] that can break-up the reader’s experience with the narrative flow of the study. Analyzing articles helps students practice comprehending these elements of writing, critiquing the arguments being made, reflecting upon the significance of the research, and how it relates to building new knowledge and understanding or applying new approaches to practice. Comprehending scholarly writing also involves thinking critically about where you fit within the overall dialogue among scholars concerning the research problem, finding possible gaps in the research that require further analysis, or identifying where the author(s) has failed to examine fully any specific elements of the study.

In addition, journal article analysis assignments are used by professors to strengthen discipline-specific information literacy skills, either alone or in relation to other tasks, such as, giving a class presentation or participating in a group project. These benefits can include the ability to:

• Effectively paraphrase text, which leads to a more thorough understanding of the overall study;
• Identify and describe strengths and weaknesses of the study and their implications;
• Relate the article to other course readings and in relation to particular research concepts or ideas discussed during class;
• Think critically about the research and summarize complex ideas contained within;
• Plan, organize, and write an effective inquiry-based paper that investigates a research study, evaluates evidence, expounds on the author’s main ideas, and presents an argument concerning the significance and impact of the research in a clear and concise manner;
• Model the type of source summary and critique you should do for any college-level research paper; and,
• Increase interest and engagement with the research problem of the study as well as with the discipline.

Kershaw, Trina C., Jennifer Fugate, and Aminda J. O'Hare. "Teaching Undergraduates to Understand Published Research through Structured Practice in Identifying Key Research Concepts." Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology . Advance online publication, 2020; Franco, Josue. “Introducing the Analysis of Journal Articles.” Prepared for presentation at the American Political Science Association’s 2020 Teaching and Learning Conference, February 7-9, 2020, Albuquerque, New Mexico; Sego, Sandra A. and Anne E. Stuart. "Learning to Read Empirical Articles in General Psychology." Teaching of Psychology 43 (2016): 38-42; Woodward-Kron, Robyn. "Critical Analysis and the Journal Article Review Assignment." Prospect 18 (August 2003): 20-36; MacMillan, Margy and Allison MacKenzie. "Strategies for Integrating Information Literacy and Academic Literacy: Helping Undergraduate Students make the most of Scholarly Articles." Library Management 33 (2012): 525-535; Kershaw, Trina C., Jordan P. Lippman, and Jennifer Fugate. "Practice Makes Proficient: Teaching Undergraduate Students to Understand Published Research." Instructional Science 46 (2018): 921-946.

Structure and Organization

A journal article analysis paper should be written in paragraph format and include an instruction to the study, your analysis of the research, and a conclusion that provides an overall assessment of the author's work, along with an explanation of what you believe is the study's overall impact and significance. Unless the purpose of the assignment is to examine foundational studies published many years ago, you should select articles that have been published relatively recently [e.g., within the past few years].

Since the research has been completed, reference to the study in your paper should be written in the past tense, with your analysis stated in the present tense [e.g., “The author portrayed access to health care services in rural areas as primarily a problem of having reliable transportation. However, I believe the author is overgeneralizing this issue because...”].

Introduction Section

The first section of a journal analysis paper should describe the topic of the article and highlight the author’s main points. This includes describing the research problem and theoretical framework, the rationale for the research, the methods of data gathering and analysis, the key findings, and the author’s final conclusions and recommendations. The narrative should focus on the act of describing rather than analyzing. Think of the introduction as a more comprehensive and detailed descriptive abstract of the study.

Possible questions to help guide your writing of the introduction section may include:

• Who are the authors and what credentials do they hold that contributes to the validity of the study?
• What was the research problem being investigated?
• What type of research design was used to investigate the research problem?
• What theoretical idea(s) and/or research questions were used to address the problem?
• What was the source of the data or information used as evidence for analysis?
• What methods were applied to investigate this evidence?
• What were the author's overall conclusions and key findings?

Critical Analysis Section

The second section of a journal analysis paper should describe the strengths and weaknesses of the study and analyze its significance and impact. This section is where you shift the narrative from describing to analyzing. Think critically about the research in relation to other course readings, what has been discussed in class, or based on your own life experiences. If you are struggling to identify any weaknesses, explain why you believe this to be true. However, no study is perfect, regardless of how laudable its design may be. Given this, think about the repercussions of the choices made by the author(s) and how you might have conducted the study differently. Examples can include contemplating the choice of what sources were included or excluded in support of examining the research problem, the choice of the method used to analyze the data, or the choice to highlight specific recommended courses of action and/or implications for practice over others. Another strategy is to place yourself within the research study itself by thinking reflectively about what may be missing if you had been a participant in the study or if the recommended courses of action specifically targeted you or your community.

Possible questions to help guide your writing of the analysis section may include:

Introduction

• Did the author clearly state the problem being investigated?
• What was your reaction to and perspective on the research problem?
• Was the study’s objective clearly stated? Did the author clearly explain why the study was necessary?
• How well did the introduction frame the scope of the study?
• Did the introduction conclude with a clear purpose statement?

Literature Review

• Did the literature review lay a foundation for understanding the significance of the research problem?
• Did the literature review provide enough background information to understand the problem in relation to relevant contexts [e.g., historical, economic, social, cultural, etc.].
• Did literature review effectively place the study within the domain of prior research? Is anything missing?
• Was the literature review organized by conceptual categories or did the author simply list and describe sources?
• Did the author accurately explain how the data or information were collected?
• Was the data used sufficient in supporting the study of the research problem?
• Was there another methodological approach that could have been more illuminating?
• Give your overall evaluation of the methods used in this article. How much trust would you put in generating relevant findings?

Results and Discussion

• Were the results clearly presented?
• Did you feel that the results support the theoretical and interpretive claims of the author? Why?
• What did the author(s) do especially well in describing or analyzing their results?
• Was the author's evaluation of the findings clearly stated?
• How well did the discussion of the results relate to what is already known about the research problem?
• Was the discussion of the results free of repetition and redundancies?
• What interpretations did the authors make that you think are in incomplete, unwarranted, or overstated?
• Did the conclusion effectively capture the main points of study?
• Did the conclusion address the research questions posed? Do they seem reasonable?
• Were the author’s conclusions consistent with the evidence and arguments presented?
• Has the author explained how the research added new knowledge or understanding?

Overall Writing Style

• If the article included tables, figures, or other non-textual elements, did they contribute to understanding the study?
• Were ideas developed and related in a logical sequence?
• Were transitions between sections of the article smooth and easy to follow?

Overall Evaluation Section

The final section of a journal analysis paper should bring your thoughts together into a coherent assessment of the value of the research study . This section is where the narrative flow transitions from analyzing specific elements of the article to critically evaluating the overall study. Explain what you view as the significance of the research in relation to the overall course content and any relevant discussions that occurred during class. Think about how the article contributes to understanding the overall research problem, how it fits within existing literature on the topic, how it relates to the course, and what it means to you as a student researcher. In some cases, your professor will also ask you to describe your experiences writing the journal article analysis paper as part of a reflective learning exercise.

Possible questions to help guide your writing of the conclusion and evaluation section may include:

• Was the structure of the article clear and well organized?
• Was the topic of current or enduring interest to you?
• What were the main weaknesses of the article? [this does not refer to limitations stated by the author, but what you believe are potential flaws]
• Was any of the information in the article unclear or ambiguous?
• What did you learn from the research? If nothing stood out to you, explain why.
• Assess the originality of the research. Did you believe it contributed new understanding of the research problem?
• Were you persuaded by the author’s arguments?
• If the author made any final recommendations, will they be impactful if applied to practice?
• In what ways could future research build off of this study?
• What implications does the study have for daily life?
• Was the use of non-textual elements, footnotes or endnotes, and/or appendices helpful in understanding the research?
• What lingering questions do you have after analyzing the article?

NOTE: Avoid using quotes. One of the main purposes of writing an article analysis paper is to learn how to effectively paraphrase and use your own words to summarize a scholarly research study and to explain what the research means to you. Using and citing a direct quote from the article should only be done to help emphasize a key point or to underscore an important concept or idea.

Business: The Article Analysis . Fred Meijer Center for Writing, Grand Valley State University; Bachiochi, Peter et al. "Using Empirical Article Analysis to Assess Research Methods Courses." Teaching of Psychology 38 (2011): 5-9; Brosowsky, Nicholaus P. et al. “Teaching Undergraduate Students to Read Empirical Articles: An Evaluation and Revision of the QALMRI Method.” PsyArXi Preprints , 2020; Holster, Kristin. “Article Evaluation Assignment”. TRAILS: Teaching Resources and Innovations Library for Sociology . Washington DC: American Sociological Association, 2016; Kershaw, Trina C., Jennifer Fugate, and Aminda J. O'Hare. "Teaching Undergraduates to Understand Published Research through Structured Practice in Identifying Key Research Concepts." Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology . Advance online publication, 2020; Franco, Josue. “Introducing the Analysis of Journal Articles.” Prepared for presentation at the American Political Science Association’s 2020 Teaching and Learning Conference, February 7-9, 2020, Albuquerque, New Mexico; Reviewer's Guide . SAGE Reviewer Gateway, SAGE Journals; Sego, Sandra A. and Anne E. Stuart. "Learning to Read Empirical Articles in General Psychology." Teaching of Psychology 43 (2016): 38-42; Kershaw, Trina C., Jordan P. Lippman, and Jennifer Fugate. "Practice Makes Proficient: Teaching Undergraduate Students to Understand Published Research." Instructional Science 46 (2018): 921-946; Gyuris, Emma, and Laura Castell. "To Tell Them or Show Them? How to Improve Science Students’ Skills of Critical Reading." International Journal of Innovation in Science and Mathematics Education 21 (2013): 70-80; Woodward-Kron, Robyn. "Critical Analysis and the Journal Article Review Assignment." Prospect 18 (August 2003): 20-36; MacMillan, Margy and Allison MacKenzie. "Strategies for Integrating Information Literacy and Academic Literacy: Helping Undergraduate Students Make the Most of Scholarly Articles." Library Management 33 (2012): 525-535.

Writing Tip

Not All Scholarly Journal Articles Can Be Critically Analyzed

There are a variety of articles published in scholarly journals that do not fit within the guidelines of an article analysis assignment. This is because the work cannot be empirically examined or it does not generate new knowledge in a way which can be critically analyzed.

If you are required to locate a research study on your own, avoid selecting these types of journal articles:

• Theoretical essays which discuss concepts, assumptions, and propositions, but report no empirical research;
• Statistical or methodological papers that may analyze data, but the bulk of the work is devoted to refining a new measurement, statistical technique, or modeling procedure;
• Articles that review, analyze, critique, and synthesize prior research, but do not report any original research;
• Brief essays devoted to research methods and findings;
• Articles written by scholars in popular magazines or industry trade journals;
• Pre-print articles that have been posted online, but may undergo further editing and revision by the journal's editorial staff before final publication; and
• Academic commentary that discusses research trends or emerging concepts and ideas, but does not contain citations to sources.

Journal Analysis Assignment - Myers . Writing@CSU, Colorado State University; Franco, Josue. “Introducing the Analysis of Journal Articles.” Prepared for presentation at the American Political Science Association’s 2020 Teaching and Learning Conference, February 7-9, 2020, Albuquerque, New Mexico; Woodward-Kron, Robyn. "Critical Analysis and the Journal Article Review Assignment." Prospect 18 (August 2003): 20-36.

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PSY 1010: General Psychology

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Psychology in the News Assignment

Library help.

Psychology is a fascinating topic that many people are interested in! However, scholarly articles published in peer-reviewed journals often use technical language and are so detailed they can be difficult for the general public to use. For this reason, psychology research studies are often summarized in popular news sources such as magazines and news sites like TIME Magazine, CNN, or The New York Times . You might see UVU research projects summarized in local news sources like The Salt Lake Tribune or Daily Herald ! This makes psychology research accessible to more people, since you don't need formal educational training in psychology to understand the popular news article.

• Peer-Reviewed Articles : Published in scholarly journals. Articles are written by experts and reviewed by several other experts in the field before publication to help ensure high quality. They often report the results of a research study, including how the study was conducted, how researchers collected and analyzed the data, and the results of the study. May include technical language or jargon.
• Popular News Articles: Published in magazines, newspapers, or on commercial websites. Typically written by a journalist or staff writer who has interviewed someone else as part of their writing process—if the article is summarizing a research study, you'll often see quotes from the expert who did the research. Articles do not go through peer-review and can be published very quickly. Typically written so the article is understandable even if the reader hasn't studied psychology.

Tips for Finding Your Articles

You can usually find psychology news articles with a search engine like Google, or by looking on news websites and searching for "psychology research." By contrast, peer-reviewed journal articles usually require using a library database and often aren't free to read online without a library subscription.

When you find a popular psychology news article summarizing a research study, look for clues in the news article to help you track down the original scholarly article about the study. Phrases like "a recent research study found" are a sign you're reading an article that's summarizing scholarly research available in more detail in a journal. Look for a link that leads you to the original article, the name of the researcher, the name of the journal, or a formal citation at the end of the article—you can use any of these details to help find the peer-reviewed article! If you follow a link and it takes you to a journal website asking you to pay to read the article, try copying the scholarly article title and then searching for it in the OneSearch database on the Fulton Library's homepage.

The following websites are examples of places you can look for popular psychology research articles. They do not include peer-reviewed articles.

Note: Not all psychology news articles summarize specific peer-reviewed articles, and not all peer-reviewed articles will be summarized in a popular article.

Example Psychology Articles

The following examples are a popular article from a news magazine and a scholarly article from a peer-reviewed journal. The popular article is a summary of the research study described in the scholarly article. Do not use these articles for your assignment! You'll need to find your own articles, using the tips in this guide. Your scholarly articles may need to come from an approved psychology journal—ask your instructor if you have any questions or see the list of commonly used psychology journals on the Find Articles page of this guide.

Popular Article from a News Magazine

• This is Your Brain on Puppies A popular psychology article published in the news magazine The Atlantic . It summarizes psychology research on a concept called "cute aggression" that you can learn about in more detail by following links in the article to the scholarly research article.

Scholarly Article from a Peer-Reviewed Journal

• “It’s So Cute I Could Crush It!”: Understanding Neural Mechanisms of Cute Aggression A peer-reviewed article from the journal Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience on a research study related to "cute aggression." It includes a detailed Methods section, explaining how the researchers conducted the study.

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How to Summarize a Psychology Article

Summarizing or critiquing a journal article is a common assignment for a student completing a course in psychology, regardless of the level. It is an important skill to master early on, as it will be encountered repeatedly. If you continue in the field of psychology, this skill will enhance your own research abilities, helping you tell the good research from the bad. Sometimes you'll be asked to summarize an article so that you have a condensed version of the details of the piece; more often, a summary will require you to also make some form of critique.

Choose an article to review. If your instructor or professor has not provided a specific article for you to review, then you must choose one on your own. You can do this by searching your school library for journals in the area of psychology that interests you most. One of the most common journal indexes for searching for articles in the field is PyscINFO, which contains abstracts and references that will help guide you to an appropriate article.

Read the article that you have selected or been assigned at least three times. At first you may just skim the article and read the abstract, introduction and discussion sections to get a general overview of the study. Read the paper again in its entirety, paying attention to the methods and results sections. Finally, read the paper a third time with an eye for asking questions about what the researchers have or have not done. Consider alternative explanations for the results from those provided by the authors of the article.

Create an outline for your review/summary. As with all papers, creating an outline will help to keep your writing focused and organized. Your outline might include the following headings: Study Rationale, Hypotheses, Method, Sample, Results, Major Findings, and Critique.

Summarize the key points of the study. In the rationale section, summarize the purpose for the study, why the researchers thought it was important and how they felt it would add to the existing literature on the subject. If the study included hypotheses, list the precise hypotheses that were stated in the paper. The summary of the review should identify the type of research design (experiment, correlational study, observational study), and contain a brief statement about how the study was conducted. Provide information about the sample characteristics, including the number of participants (or observations), their basic demographics, and how they were recruited into the study. The results section should briefly summarize the results based on the original hypotheses presented. Finally, summarize the major findings of the study.

Critique the research question, design, analysis and conclusions as the final part of your review. Did the researchers ask the right question? Did they use the right type of research design and method to address the question that they asked? Would a different research design have lead to different (or better) results? Did the researchers use the proper kind of data analysis to address the data and research questions presented in the paper? Are there strengths and weaknesses to the data analysis approach they used? Did they properly pay attention to the assumptions associated with the data analysis they performed? Finally, did they draw the same conclusions from their results that you would draw? Was there anything they misinterpreted, underinterpreted or overinterpreted? What is your overall impression of the paper and how does it contribute to the literature?

Things You'll Need

• University of Idaho: How to Summarize

Karen L. Blair has been professionally writing since 2001. Her work has been published in academic journals such as the "Journal of Sex Research," "Journal of Social and Personal Relationships" and "Psychology & Sexuality." Blair received her M.Sc. in psychology at Acadia University and her Ph.D. in social psychology at Queen's University. She is currently a post-doctoral fellow and research consultant.

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She Lied, Cheated and Stole. Then She Wrote a Book About It.

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Resources: Discussions and Assignments

Assignment: research in psychology, psychology in the news.

STEP 1 : Find a popular news article from within the past 10 years that reports on the results of a psychological study. This should not be a blog entry, but a published article from a news source such as Time Magazine , The New York Times , Newsweek , NPR , CNN , Fox News , etc. A great place to look is the APA’s Psychology news portal . Read through the article and ensure that it is descriptive and sufficiently long enough in order to draw conclusions from the original research mentioned.

STEP 2 : Go find the psychological study or studies that are mentioned in the news report. Sometimes those are not freely available online, so you may have to track down the original study through your library’s website. You can find these articles within reputable journals, such as the American Journal of Psychology , Cognitive Psychology , Emotion , Journal of Abnormal Psychology , Journal of Applied Psychology , Journal of Counseling Psychology , Journal of Educational Psychology , Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , and Memory . The study should have been performed within the past 10 years.

STEP 3 : Write a paper between 250-500 words that:

• describes and summarizes both articles
• compares and contrasts the key points, style, and purpose of the news article with that of the research article
• examines if the news article accurately describes the research
• includes correct APA citations (both in-text and in a reference page) for both of the articles
• Finding Articles Assignment. Provided by : Lumen Learning. License : CC BY: Attribution

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How to Become a More Empathetic Listener

Listening isn’t a solo act; it’s a collaborative one.

When the subject of how to be a good listener comes up, psychologists often talk about the value of “perspective-taking” — that is, projecting ourselves into the lives of those we’re listening to. This has been shown to make us grow more generous and less prejudiced toward them, but it’s a flawed way to understand others, because it treats empathy as a solo sport, encouraging listeners simply to try to understand what someone else is going through. What truly good listeners do, however, is work collaboratively with other people to understand them. Scientists call this “perspective-getting,” in which one person uses questions and active listening to understand someone else’s feelings. Perspective-getting boosts mutual understanding, improves relationships, and helps people discover common ground. In this article, the author, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, offers readers guidance on how to practice perspective-getting and get better at it over time.

In 1984, the physician Howard Beckman and his colleagues recorded 74 medical conversations, all of which began with a doctor asking a patient what their concern was. Seventy percent of patients were interrupted within 20 seconds ; just 2% got to finish their thought. The study was widely shared, but fifteen years later, Beckman found doctors were still interrupting just as often, and just as quickly.

• Jamil Zaki is a professor of psychology at Stanford University and the author of The War for Kindness . His new book, Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness , will be published in September of 2024.

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

The interactive effect between economic uncertainty and life history strategy on corrupt intentions: a life history theory approach.

• 1 Fudan University, Shanghai, Shanghai Municipality, China
• 2 Department of Psychology, Fudan University, Shanghai, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

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Why do some people show more corruption when facing uncertain environment?The present study aimed to give a plausible answer from an evolutionary perspective: this might be rooted in people's different life history strategies (slow vs. fast). The present study measured the participants' corrupt intentions by a hypothetical scenario and primed the feeling of economic environmental uncertainty by requiring the participants to read economic uncertainty (vs. neutral) materials. It is revealed that the participants with fast life history strategies had stronger corrupt intentions after reading materials about economic uncertainty than reading neutral materials. In addition, the desire for power mediated the interactive effect between life history strategy and economic uncertainty on corrupt intentions for fast life history strategists. This finding was discussed for its theoretical and practical implications from the perspective of life history theory.

Keywords: Economic uncertainty, life history strategy, Desire for power, corrupt intentions, evolutionary psychology perspective

Received: 25 Dec 2023; Accepted: 11 Apr 2024.

Copyright: © 2024 Sai and Zhu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Lei Zhu, Department of Psychology, Fudan University, Shanghai, China

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

April 2, 2024

Eclipse Psychology: When the Sun and Moon Align, So Do We

How a total solar eclipse creates connection, unity and caring among the people watching

By Katie Weeman

Students observing a partial solar eclipse on June 21, 2020, in Lhokseumawe, Aceh Province, Indonesia.

NurPhoto/Getty Images

This article is part of a special report on the total solar eclipse that will be visible from parts of the U.S., Mexico and Canada on April 8, 2024.

It was 11:45 A.M. on August 21, 2017. I was in a grassy field in Glendo, Wyo., where I was surrounded by strangers turned friends, more than I could count—and far more people than had ever flocked to this town, population 210 or so. Golden sunlight blanketed thousands of cars parked in haphazard rows all over the rolling hills. The shadows were quickly growing longer, the air was still, and all of our faces pointed to the sky. As the moon progressively covered the sun, the light melted away, the sky blackened, and the temperature dropped. At the moment of totality, when the moon completely covered the sun , some people around me suddenly gasped. Some cheered; some cried; others laughed in disbelief.

Exactly 53 minutes later, in a downtown park in Greenville, S.C., the person who edited this story and the many individuals around him reacted in exactly the same ways.

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When a total solar eclipse descends—as one will across Mexico, the U.S. and Canada on April 8—everyone and everything in the path of totality are engulfed by deep shadow. Unlike the New Year’s Eve countdown that lurches across the globe one blocky time zone after another, the shadow of totality is a dark spot on Earth that measures about 100 miles wide and cruises steadily along a path, covering several thousand miles in four to five hours. The human experiences along that path are not isolated events any more than individual dominoes are isolated pillars in a formation. Once that first domino is tipped, we are all linked into something bigger—and unstoppable. We all experience the momentum and the awe together.

When this phenomenon progresses from Mexico through Texas, the Great Lakes and Canada on April 8, many observers will describe the event as life-changing, well beyond expectations. “You feel a sense of wrongness in those moments before totality , when your surroundings change so rapidly,” says Kate Russo, an author, psychologist and eclipse chaser. “Our initial response is to ask ourselves, ‘Is this an opportunity or a threat?’ When the light changes and the temperature drops, that triggers primal fear. When we have that threat response, our whole body is tuned in to taking in as much information as possible.”

Russo, who has witnessed 13 total eclipses and counting, has interviewed eclipse viewers from around the world. She continues to notice the same emotions felt by all. They begin with that sense of wrongness and primal fear as totality approaches. When totality starts, we feel powerful awe and connection to the world around us. A sense of euphoria develops as we continue watching, and when it’s over, we have a strong desire to seek out the next eclipse.

“The awe we feel during a total eclipse makes us think outside our sense of self. It makes you more attuned to things outside of you,” says Sean Goldy, a postdoctoral fellow at the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins University.

Goldy and his team analyzed Twitter data from nearly 2.9 million people during the 2017 total solar eclipse. They found that people within the path of totality were more likely to use not only language that expressed awe but also language that conveyed being unified and affiliated with others. That meant using more “we” words (“us” instead of “me”) and more humble words (“maybe” instead of “always”).

“During an eclipse, people have a broader, more collective focus,” Goldy says. “We also found that the more people expressed awe, the more likely they were to use those ‘we’ words, indicating that people who experience this emotion feel more connected with others.”

This connectivity ties into a sociological concept known as “collective effervescence,” Russo and Goldy say. When groups of humans come together over a shared experience, the energy is greater than the sum of its parts. If you’ve ever been to a large concert or sporting event, you’ve felt the electricity generated by a hive of humans. It magnifies our emotions.

I felt exactly that unified feeling in the open field in Glendo, as if thousands of us were breathing as one. But that’s not the only way people can experience a total eclipse.

During the 2008 total eclipse in Mongolia “I was up on a peak,” Russo recounts. “I was with only my husband and a close friend. We had left the rest of our 25-person tour group at the bottom of the hill. From that vantage point, when the shadow came sweeping in, there was not one man-made thing I could see: no power lines, no buildings or structures. Nothing tethered me to time: It could have been thousands of years ago or long into the future. In that moment, it was as if time didn’t exist.”

Giving us the ability to unhitch ourselves from time—to stop dwelling on time is a unique superpower of a total eclipse. In Russo’s work as a clinical psychologist, she notices patterns in our modern-day mentality. “People with anxiety tend to spend a lot of time in the future. And people with depression spend a lot of time in the past,” she says. An eclipse, time and time again, has the ability to snap us back into the present, at least for a few minutes. “And when you’re less anxious and worried, it opens you up to be more attuned to other people, feel more connected, care for others and be more compassionate,” Goldy says.

Russo, who founded Being in the Shadow , an organization that provides information about total solar eclipses and organizes eclipse events around the world, has experienced this firsthand. Venue managers regularly tell her that eclipse crowds are among the most polite and humble: they follow the rules; they pick up their garbage—they care.

Eclipses remind us that we are part of something bigger, that we are connected with something vast. In the hours before and after totality you have to wear protective glasses to look at the sun, to prevent damage to your eyes. But during the brief time when the moon blocks the last of the sun’s rays, you can finally lower your glasses and look directly at the eclipse. It’s like making eye contact with the universe.

“In my practice, usually if someone says, ‘I feel insignificant,’ that’s a negative thing. But the meaning shifts during an eclipse,” Russo says. To feel insignificant in the moon’s shadow instead means that your sense of self shrinks, that your ego shrinks, she says.

The scale of our “big picture” often changes after witnessing the awe of totality, too. “When you zoom out—really zoom out—it blows away our differences,” Goldy says. When you sit in the shadow of a celestial rock blocking the light of a star 400 times its size that burns at 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit on its surface, suddenly that argument with your partner, that bill sitting on your counter or even the differences among people’s beliefs, origins or politics feel insignificant. When we shift our perspective, connection becomes boundless.

You don’t need to wait for the next eclipse to feel this way. As we travel through life, we lose our relationship with everyday awe. Remember what that feels like? It’s the way a dog looks at a treat or the way my toddler points to the “blue sky!” outside his car window in the middle of rush hour traffic. To find awe, we have to surrender our full attention to the beauty around us. During an eclipse, that comes easily. In everyday life, we may need to be more intentional.

“Totality kick-starts our ability to experience wonder,” Russo says. And with that kick start, maybe we can all use our wonderment faculties more—whether that means pausing for a moment during a morning walk, a hug or a random sunset on a Tuesday. In the continental U.S., we won’t experience another total eclipse until 2044. Let’s not wait until then to seek awe and connection.

Nine-year MLB veteran becomes free agent after refusing outright assignment

V eteran infielder/outfielder Tony Kemp  has elected to become a free agent after clearing outright waivers, the Orioles announced (h/t insider Roch Kubatko ).  Kemp was designated for assignment earlier this week, and he has enough MLB service time to request a return to the open market rather than accept an outright assignment to Triple-A.

Kemp could now be joining his third team in less than two months.  The Reds inked Kemp to a minor league deal in February but then released him on March 19, so the 32-year-old a bit of an early start ahead of the wave of players cut loose at the end of spring camps.  The Orioles ended up signing Kemp to a guaranteed deal worth $1M, making for a decent payday for what ended up as five games for Kemp in a Baltimore uniform.  A new team that signs Kemp would only owe him the prorated minimum salary for his time on a big league roster, while the O’s are on the hook for whatever remains of the $1M.

Apart from two innings at shortstop, Kemp has played exclusively as a second baseman and left fielder over the last five seasons.  Kemp has hit .238/.329/.342 over 1,498 plate appearances in that same span, though even that modest production is largely carried by a solid 2021 campaign.  Since Opening Day 2022, Kemp has hit only .222/.304/.318 in 987 PA with the Athletics and Orioles.

Despite this lack of recent production, Kemp’s versatility, left-handed bat, and reputation as a clubhouse leader earned him some attention from multiple teams  this past offseason, so it seems likely that he’ll land elsewhere in pretty short order.  Speculatively speaking, a return to Cincinnati might make sense, given how the Reds’ once-vaunted position-player depth has continued to take hits since Kemp was released.

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MLB Trade Rumors

Marlins Designate Matt Andriese For Assignment

By Mark Polishuk | April 13, 2024 at 11:03am CDT

The Marlins announced that right-hander Matt Andriese has been designated for assignment.  Calvin Faucher has been called up from Triple-A Jacksonville to take his fellow right’s spot on the 26-man roster.

Signed to a minor league deal during the offseason, Andriese had that contract selected on April 4, resulting in his first taste of Major League action since the 2021 campaign.  Andriese had a 5.40 ERA over five innings and three appearances with Miami, eating some innings in a mop-up capacity while also allowing two homers in this brief sample size.

The home run ball was often an issue for Andriese during his seven-year run in the bigs from 2015-21, as he had a 14.5% homer rate over 509 innings with five different clubs.  Andriese’s 2022 campaign was spent in Japan with the Yomiuri Giants, and he returned to North America last season on a minor league deal with the Dodgers, posting a 6.05 ERA across 93 2/3 innings for Triple-A Oklahoma City without ever getting a call-up.

Should Andriese clear waivers, Miami could opt to keep him around at Triple-A as bullpen depth, even if his lack of minor league options makes him an imperfect candidate to be shuffled back and forth between the majors and minors.  Andriese can also refuse an outright assignment to Triple-A in order to become a free agent, as he has previously been outrighted off a 40-man roster earlier in his career.  Given his rather long path back to the Show, it seems possible that Andriese might prefer the relative stability of remaining in the Marlins organization rather than again testing the open market.

4 hours ago

Entire bullpen needs to be DFA’D

2 hours ago

You do NOT want to upset Calvin’s Mom: the mother Faucher

3 hours ago

Don’t see the words “Marlins” and “stability” used in the same sentence much.

But if he is seeking the team that is most likely to run out of better pitchers, the Marlins seem as good a spot as any.

Andriese was one of many failed analytics signings by Bloom, he gave him a $2M contract in 2021 despite horrible legacy numbers the prior 3 seasons. “Great peripherals” Bloom said.

Sox released him in August of that same season, he pitched 16 innings total since then.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

How’s your Faucher?

It’s funny you should ask.

This team’s top BWAR player is Declan Cronin. Unshockingly, the despiration is palpable.

36 seconds ago

Yes , yes , yes and yes but he did pitch in the MLB “ AllStars “ Tour of Japan in 2018 representing the Diamondbacks.

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